A Very Special Edition Of Monday Miscellany

Meaning, of course, that it's a day late.

Tuesday, afternoon,
I'm just beginning to see,
Now I'm on my way,
It doesn't matter to me,
Chasing the clouds away.

I'm looking at myself, reflections of my mind,
It's just the kind of day to leave myself behind,
So gently swaying thru the fairy-land of love,
If you'll just come with me and see the beauty of

Tuesday afternoon.

• Why eating a Big Mac is cheaper than eating a salad:

(source)

When I lived in Korea I remember  beef as being hideously expensive.  However, beef that had been raised, butchered and packaged in the USA, then shipped across the Pacific Ocean was cheaper than Korean  beef.  Now I understand why this was so. 

Another problem with subsidies is that while grains do receive 13%, most of that is for the bland, nutritionally deficient modern corn we insist on including in almost every single thing we eat.  Our animals are just corn on legs, the legendary American sweet tooth is sated not by sugar but corn syrup and, increasing all the time, its grotesque, mutant cousin high fructose corn syrup.  Everything is corn.

Nothing we do as a nation to improve our overall dietary health will matter until we reduce corn to its rightful place as a small part of our overall diet - and for our livestock, to its place as not a part of their diet at all.

• Apparently Americans are church-shopping quite a bit, with all that implies.  Around 44% of us have left the faith tradition of our youth or have opted out of religion entirely.  Evangelical churches like to claim that they're growing, but the truth is that they're just on the receiving end of membership transfers.  Even when growth comes from "conversions," it's usually just a matter of different definitions of what it means to be a Christian.  If you grow up in a church that believes in Christian baptism as initiation into the Church, and later you come under the influence of a tradition that insists upon a particular experience, usually at the end of a long, emotion-filled worship service, then any response you give that fits within that will be counted as "conversion," as "really becoming a Christian," even if you've never left the Church your whole life.

I can honestly say:  good.  Let the churches decline and decline.  They deserve it.  I only hope that Christianity declines enough in the United States to allow its reformation and healing.

• "Top Republican strategists are working on plans to protect the GOP from charges of racism or sexism in the general election."  I don't understand why.  It's not like they've ever cared about that before.

Comments

[low-tech cyclist]

I hate, hate, hate those visually misleading graphs. People mentally take in the picture, not the numbers.

Take the one on the right. The 11 servings from grains don't take up nearly twice as much room on the page as the 6 servings from proteins, as they should. They take up 4-5 times as much room, despite representing less than twice as much stuff.

Same with the one on the left. 73.80 is about 5.5 times as big as 13.23, but is represented by an area more like 10 times as great.